Although not strictly a resource, this post may be interesting or useful to some. I’m going to research into why reasonably small start-ups such as Envato (formerly Eden) grow so rapidly and successfully. From just one small flash mini-stock exchange, FlashDen, their network has grown at a tremendous rate, with millions of page views, hundreds of comments and thousands of RSS subscribers.
However, they must have started off with at least some support or immediate help. Of course they did:
- Contacts. Previous to running their own company, Collis and Cyan were both designers and freelancers, and had already built up their own profile on the internet, along with many useful contacts. These contacts would have helped in hiring talented writers and creative people for their sites (for tutorials or blog posts & etc)
- Money. We can safely assume that a good amount of initial cash was put into the sites and to help start the new company up.
- An idea. Crucial to the success of the company, both FlashDen and FreelanceSwitch were, at the time, niche-filling sites. Only now have many similar sites begun to appear. The TUTS sites also hold a unique idea within an over-filled tutorial niche. They only have top quality tutorials, which again, sets them apart from the rest.
OK, so they had an excellent advantage to start with, and great ideas, but what actually draws in and keeps the visitors in? I believe the answer is simple: free stuff:
Smashing Magazine: the classic free WordPress theme releases. It works simply for two reasons: 1. WordPress is used by so many people, there’s always room for more themes and 2. the quality of free WP themes is not normally very high, yet the ones released by Design Desease and Smashing Magazine are always top quality which guarantees a lot of usage accross the WP blogsphere. Combine this with their excellent posts highlighting other creative content and analysis, more free content, and you can begin to see why they succeed so well in such an over-crowded market.
PSDTUTS
: tutorials are another example of how blogs, such as PSDTUTS, gain serious momentum fast. Tutorials are just free content that you create for yourself. A more hands-on approach, but one that means the learner can then reproduce the techniques learnt in different situations. Thus making tutorials extremely popular and great for making a sites visitors sky rocket.
WebDesignerWall: givaways, the ultimate tool in gaining comments and visitors. However, givaways normally only work on sites which are already medium sized, since the company giving away the item will want to be sure there will be some interest. Unless, of course, it’s a giveaway for an internal product.
So there it is: free content = visitors + rapid growth
One quick note on what doesn’t work is all those ridiculous roundup posts. Yes, they work for a while, and they work inbetween decent analyitical posts. But where they don’t work is on blogs where every post is one of these roundups. People quickly realize there are easier and better ways to discover such sites/links/resources.
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